mere subjective "stream of tendency," or anything of that sort. It
would of course be foolish to doubt the sincerity of the conviction
which he so constantly and so eagerly asserts. Nevertheless, one
cannot but put forward, even at this stage, the tentative theory that
he is playing tricks with his own mind, and attributing reality and
personality to something that was in its origin a figure of speech. He
has been hypnotized by the word God:

As when we dwell upon a word we know,
Repeating, till the word we know so well
Becomes a wonder, and we know not why.

At all events, "God the Invisible King" is not the creator and
sustainer of the universe. As to the origin of things Mr. Wells
professes the most profound agnosticism. "At the back of all known
things," he says, "there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of
existence is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or
death or good or ill.... The new religion does not pretend that the
God of its life is that Being, or that he has any relation of control
or association with that Being. It does not even assert that God knows
all, or much more than we do, about that ultimate Being" (p. 14). Very
good; but--here is the first question which seems to arise out of the
Wellsian thesis--are we not entitled to ask of "the new religion" some
more definite account of the relation between "God" and "the Veiled
Being"? Surely it is not enough that it should simply refrain from
"asserting" anything at all on the subject. If "God" is outside
ourselves ("a Being, not us but dealing with us and through us," p. 6)
we cannot leave him hanging in the void, like the rope which the
Indian conjurer is fabled to throw up into the air till it hooks
itself on to nothingness. If we are to believe in him as a lever for
the righting of a world that has somehow run askew, we want to know
something of his fulcrum. Is it possible thus to dissociate him from
the Veiled Being, and proclaim him an independent, an agnostic God? Do
we really get over any difficulty--do we not rather create new
difficulties,--by saying, as Mr. Wells practically does, "Our God is
no metaphysician. He does not care, and very likely does not know, how
this tangle of existence came into being. He is only concerned to
disentangle it a little, to reduce the chaos of the world to some sort
of seemliness and order"? Is it an idle and presumptuous curiosity
which enquires whether we are to consider him co-ordi